Redirected to Kentico 8 docs again

I've been troubleshooting and researching very specific subjects related to Kentico for the past few months, and every time I find a lead that points to any version of the old docs, I get redirected to the v8 docs homepage - then I have to edit the url to add in the "/M_m/" directory that was created for old documentation versions.

For example I have to change this link from an answer on Stack Overflow:

And I have to do that for every single link that isn't about v8. Since Kentico 8 hasn't been around for very long, but all the old versions of Kentico have, the majority of the external links that I follow to Kentico's docs are now broken.

Sure, I'm redirected to the homepage for v8 docs, but that doesn't seem very helpful to me as a user - new or veteran. I'm aware that it's just a small url change, so it's only an annoying hassle for me now, but if I was a new developer for a company using an old version of Kentico, I'm not even linked to a related article in Kentico 8's docs.

Why would you not preserve the old urls so that this doesn't affect your users, especially since it's so easy to do in Kentico? In fact, if the v8 docs are on a completely separate subdomain from the old docs, why change the old URLs at all?

Correct Answer

thank you for your feedback on this! The links that don't contain a version number always redirected to the latest version of the documentation up until Kentico 7. The links pointed to the appropriate page in the newest version.

With the change to Kentico 8 and the restructuring of the documentation, this was no longer possible, as some pages were merged, some pages were split into more, and majority of pages were renamed. With the redirect, we wanted to provide readers with a way to look up the information in the newest documentation.

However, seeing your and others' feedback, we will abandon the redirection and let the links point to Kentico 7 documentation.

I hope this makes sense to you. I'll appreciate further comments on this issue or on the documentation in general.

If you notice, they aren't using Kentico for the documentation site, they are using Atlassian Confluence. Perhaps there is a different way to set it up so that you can easily change a version or have a preferred version that is used while you browse the site. Or there is a possibility that it is a limitation of Confluence, either way they might need to look at a different solution for documentation.